Gulf of Mexico oil spillBalls of steel: A scientists proposes dropping steel balls into well to stop leak

Published 21 June 2010

Willard Wattenburg made a name for himself by directing the capping of the more than 500 hundred burning oil wells in Kuwait after the Gulf War in 1991; he now proposes dropping steel balls of different sizes into the gushing well; if the steel balls are big enough in diameter, their weight will pull them downward even through the upward-rushing torrent of oil and gas; they will settle into the well at some deep level and begin to clog it

Is there a quick way to stop the flow of oil in the Gulf of Mexico? One maverick scientist says the answer may be as simple as dropping steel balls into the gushing well and that there is no harm in trying. Some petroleum engineers say the idea is too good to be true and could make matters worse.

Willard Wattenburg, an electrical engineer and nuclear physicist from Greenville, California, made a name for himself by directing the capping of the more than 500 hundred burning oil wells in Kuwait after the Gulf War in 1991. His scientific connections helped put his idea on the desk of Energy Secretary Steven Chu.

Adrian Cho writes that the reasoning behind Wattenburg’s proposal is seductively simple. If the steel balls are big enough in diameter, their weight will pull them downward even through the upward-rushing torrent of oil and gas. So they will settle into the well at some deep level and begin to clog it.

Two hundred tons of the things should slow the gusher enough that it can then be stopped with a more conventional injection of mud, says Wattenburg, a research scientist at the Research Foundation of California State University, Chico, and a consultant to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

The big question is how large must the balls be to fall through the flow of oil and gas. To find out, Wattenburg suggests using a connection from the surface to the so-called blow-out preventer (BOP) on top of the well to pump in steel balls with a range of diameters up to about 3.8 centimeters (1.5 inches). Then engineers can simply observe which ones come flying back out of the top of the broken pipe at the top of the BOP, where oil is currently flowing from the well. If the larger balls do not come out, they must be sinking the well, Wattenburg explains. If all the balls come out, well, no

harm done. “I would claim that you have an all-win, no-lose experiment for little expense,” says Wattenburg, who estimates the cost at $100,000.

Cho notes that Wattenburg’s track record suggests that his idea should not be dismissed out of hand. In 1991 scientists estimated that it would take five years to extinguish and cap more than 500 oil wells that the Iraqi army had left burning in Kuwait when it fled before the U.S-led invasion. Wattenburg oversaw efforts that got the job done